Well done, folks! We’ve made it to the end of yet another week. This week brought us a bonkers bug situation in Final Fantasy VII and even more rumours of new Switch models coming this year, so it’s probably about time we unwind by discussing our weekend gaming plans. Team Nintendo Life has just done that below, and we invite you to join us in the comments and poll. Enjoy!

Dom Reseigh-Lincoln, reviewer

This weekend I’ll be returning to an old favourite of mine, the Darksiders series, as it finally makes the leap to Nintendo Switch. I’ve completed it twice already on PS3 and PS4, so I’m in a good position to judge just how well this comic book-style action adventure stacks up on new hardware. Let’s hope it’s good enough to get Darksiders II and maybe even Darksiders III if we’re lucky/it’s even possible. Have a good ‘un!

Ryan Craddock, staff writer

This weekend is all about the adorable, wonderful, bundle of joy that is Yoshi. Yes, Yoshi’s Crafted World has arrived and it’ll likely take up most of my evenings for the foreseeable future.

Their relatively gentle nature make Yoshi games perfect opportunities for me and my partner to sit down and play together. She’s not the biggest gamer, but the cute, cuddly aesthetic of Yoshi’s Woolly World on Wii U was enough to get her interested and we had a great time exploring everything there was to see together. Crafted World was the first time she asked me to buy a video game rather than the other way around, so I wasn’t going to say no!

Austin Voigt, contributing writer

Honestly, I’ll probably just be playing Yoshi’s Crafted World this weekend. There’s something so satisfying about the realistic look of crafting materials inside of a game. Would I ever play a game with these items in real life? Nope. Would I play with fake versions on a screen? Apparently so! It’s adorable, the demo won me over, I’m burned out on my backlog and itching for something new to try… Well done, Nintendo – you dropped this game right about when you knew everyone would be getting bored. Cheers!

Gavin Lane, staff writer

This weekend I shall be diving back into Wolfenstein II. I bought it ages ago on sale but got sidetracked by other games after the first few levels. I’m probably a third of the way through and I fired it up again on a whim this week and was amazed at how good it looks! Sure, it doesn’t hold a candle to the versions on other platforms, but on its own terms I think it looks fantastic – better than I remembered. Maybe it’s been patched up the wazoo, or maybe I just have a horrible memory, but I’m looking forward to battling a whole bunch of nazis this weekend.

Gonçalo Lopes, contributing writer

OBJECTION! It’s 2019 and I have never played or owned any previous entry of the famous Capcom lawyer’em up, but that changes this weekend with the glorious Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Trilogy having arrived from the Far East. But law is out the window in this weekend’s ARMS Party Crash Bash: if Ninjara is eliminated, me and the entire Ninjara nation will riot on the streets. A quiet, silent riot because hey… we are really good ninjas. Cute platforming shenanigans are also on the way with Yoshi’s Crafted World and Unravel Two going back and forth in the Switch cartridge slot.

My game of the week goes out to the lovely Ultrawings. I truly hope there is an update in the near future to make it support Labo VR. It is also a stark reminder we deserve a new Pilotwings.

As always, thanks for reading! Make sure to leave a vote in the poll above and a comment below with your gaming choices over the next few days…

During today’s Sega FES stage show, six more titles for the Sega AGES line were revealed.

These upcoming Switch eShop releases include Shinobi, Wonder Boy in Monster Land, Fantasy Zone, Puzzle & Action: Inchidant-R, Herzog Zwei and G-LOC Air Battle.

Shinobi

This single-player action side-scroller is based on the original arcade release dating back to 1987.

Wonder Boy in Monster Land

This action game for one player includes the Japanese and western version of the game as well as online rankings. The arcade release dates back to 1987.

Fantasy Zone

Fantasy Zone’s Sega Ages debut is based on the 3DS (arcade) release and is designed for 1-2 players. The coin stock system makes the game easier to play and adds in the original Sega Mark III boss. The original arcade game came out in 1986.

Puzzle & Action: Inchidant-R

Inchidant-R is based on the arcade and overseas version and is a sequel to Puzzle & Action: Tant-R. It comes packed with 16 mini-games, supports two players and was originally released in 1984.

Herzog Zwei

Originally developed by Technosoft – the talent behind the Thunderforce series – this single-player real-time strategy game will receive online support in the Switch release. The original game launched on the Mega Drive in 1989.

G-LOC Air Battle

G-LOC Air Battle is a single-player 3D shooter and is a port of the 1990 arcade release.

More information regarding release dates and localisation will be revealed in the near future.

Fedora test days are events where anyone can help make sure changes in Fedora work well in an upcoming release. Fedora community members often participate, and the public is welcome at these events. If you’ve never contributed to Fedora before, this is a perfect way to get started.

There are two upcoming test days this week. The first, on Tuesday March 12, is to test the Kernel 5.0. Wednesday March 13, the test day is focusing on Fedora IoT Edition. Come and test with us to make the upcoming Fedora 30 even better.

Kernel test day

The kernel team is working on final integration for kernel 5.0. This version was just recently released and will arrive soon in Fedora. This version will also be the shipping kernel for Fedora 30. As a
result, the Fedora kernel and QA teams have organized a test day for
Tuesday, March 12. Refer to the wiki page for links to the test images you’ll need to participate.

Fedora IoT Edition test day

Fedora Internet of Things is a variant of Fedora focused on IoT ecosystems. Whether you’re working on a home assistant, industrial gateways, or data storage and analytics, Fedora IoT provides a trusted open source platform to build on. Fedora IoT produces a monthly rolling release to help you keep your ecosystem up-to-date. The IoT and QA teams will have this test day for on Wednesday, March 13. Refer to the wiki page for links and resources to test the IoT Edition.

How do test days work?

A test day is an event where anyone can help make sure changes in Fedora work well in an upcoming release. Fedora community members often participate, and the public is welcome at these events. If you’ve never contributed before, this is a perfect way to get started.

To contribute, you only need to be able to download test materials (which include some large files) and then read and follow directions step by step.

Detailed information about both test days are on the wiki pages above. If you’re available on or around the days of the events, please do some testing and report your results.

Welcome back to this three-party journey to getting OpenLDAP up and running so that you can authenticate your Linux desktop machines to the LDAP server. In part one, we installed OpenLDAP on Ubuntu Server 18.04 and added our first LDAP entries to the directory tree via the Command Line Interface (CLI).

The process of manually adding data can be cumbersome and isn’t for everyone. If you have staff members that work better with a handy GUI tool, you’re in luck, as there is a very solid web-based tool that makes entering new users a snap. That tool is the LDAP Account Manager (LAM).

LAM features:

• Support for 2-factor authentication

• Schema and LDAP browser

• Support for multiple LDAP servers

• Support for account creation profiles

• File system quotas

• CSV file upload

• Automatic creation/deletion of home directories

• PDF output for all accounts

• And much more

We’ll be installing LAM on the same server we installed OpenLDAP, so make sure you’ve walked through the process from the previous article. With that taken care of, let’s get LAM up and running, so you can more easily add users to your LDAP directory tree.

Installation

Fortunately, LAM is found in the standard Ubuntu repository, so installation is as simple as opening a terminal window and issuing the command:

sudo apt-get install ldap-account-manager -y

When the installation finishes, you can then limit connections to LAM to local IP addresses only (if needed), by opening a specific .conf file with the command:

sudo nano /etc/apache2/conf-enabled/ldap-account-manager.conf

In that file, look for the line:

Require all granted

Comment that line out (add a # character at the beginning of the line) and add the following entry below it:

Require ip 192.168.1.0/24

Make sure to substitute your network IP address scheme in place of the one above (should yours differ). Save and close that file, and restart the Apache web server with the command:

sudo systemctl restart apache2

You are now ready to access the LAM web interface.

Opening LAM

Point your web browser to http://SERVER_IP/lam (where SERVER_IP is the IP address of the server hosting LAM). In the resulting screen (Figure 1), click LAM configuration in the upper right corner of the window.

In the resulting window, click Edit server profiles (Figure 2).

You will be prompted for the default profile password, so type lam and click OK. You will then be presented with the Server settings page (Figure 3).

In the Server Settings section, enter the IP address of your LDAP server. Since we’re installing LAM on the same server as OpenLDAP, we’ll leave the default. If your OpenLDAP and LAM servers are not on the same machine, make sure to enter the correct IP address for the OpenLDAP server here. In the Tree suffix entry, add the domain components of your OpenLDAP server in the form dc=example,dc=com.

Next, take care of the following configurations:

In the Security settings section (Figure 4), configure the list of valid users in the form cn=admin,dc=example,dc=com (make sure to use your LDAP admin user and domain components).

In the Account Types tab (Figure 5), configure the Active account types LDAP options. First, configure the LDAP suffix, which will be in the form ou=group,dc=example,dc=com. This is the suffix of the LDAP tree from where you will search for entries. Only entries in this subtree will be displayed in the account list. In other words, use the group attribute if you have created a group on your OpenLDAP server that all of your users (who will be authenticating against the LDAP directory tree) will be a member of. For example, if all of your users who will be allowed to log in on desktops machines are part of the group login, use that.

Next, configure the List attributes. These are the attributes that will be displayed in the account list, and are predefined values, such as #uid, #givenName, #sn, #uidNumber, etc. Fill out both the LDAP suffix and List attributes for both Users and groups.

After configuring both users and groups, click Save. This will also log you out of the Server profile manager and take you back to the login screen. You can now log into LAM using your LDAP server admin credentials. Select the user from the User name drop-down, type your LDAP admin password, and click Login. This will take you to the LAM Users tab (Figure 6), where you can start adding new users to the LDAP directory tree.

Click New User and the New User window will open (Figure 7), where you can fill in the necessary blanks.

Make sure to click Set password, so you can create a password for the new user (otherwise the user won’t be able to log into their account). Also make sure to click on the Unix tab, where you can set the username, home directory, primary group, login shell, and more. Once you’ve entered the necessary information for the user, click Save and the user account can then be found in the LDAP directory tree.

Welcome to Simpler User Creation

The LDAP Account Manager makes working with OpenLDAP exponentially easier. Without using this tool, you’ll spend more time entering users to the LDAP tree than you probably would like. The last thing you need is to take more time than necessary out of your busy admin day to create and manage users in your LDAP tree via command line.

In the next (and final entry) in this three-part series, I will walk you through the process of configuring a Linux desktop machine, such that it can authenticate against the OpenLDAP server.

Glenn

In .NET Core 3.0 we are introducing a new type of application template called Worker Service. This template is intended to give you a starting point for writing long running services in .NET Core. In this walkthrough we will create a worker and run it as a Windows Service.

Create a worker

Preview Note: In our preview releases the worker template is in the same menu as the Web templates. This will change in a future release. We intend to place the Worker Server template directly inside the create new project wizard.

Create a Worker in Visual Studio

Create a Worker on the command line

Run dotnet new worker

Run as a Windows Service

In order to run as a Windows Service we need our worker to listen for start and stop signals from ServiceBase the .NET type that exposes the Windows Service systems to .NET applications. To do this we want to:

Add the Microsoft.Extensions.Hosting.WindowsServices NuGet package

Add the UseServiceBaseLifetime call to the HostBuilder in our Program.cs

public class Program

{ public static void Main(string[] args) { CreateHostBuilder(args).Build().Run(); } public static IHostBuilder CreateHostBuilder(string[] args) => Host.CreateDefaultBuilder(args) .UseServiceBaseLifetime() .ConfigureServices(services => { services.AddHostedService<Worker>(); });

}

This method does a couple of things. First, it checks whether or not the application is actually running as a Windows Service, if it isn’t then it noops which makes this method safe to be called when running locally or when running as a Windows Service. You don’t need to add guard clauses to it and can just run the app normally when not installed as a Windows Service.

Secondly, it configures your host to use a ServiceBaseLifetime. ServiceBaseLifetime works with ServiceBase to help control the lifetime of your app when run as a Windows Service. This overrides the default ConsoleLifetime that handles signals like CTL+C.

Install the Worker

Once we have our worker using the ServiceBaseLifetime we then need to install it:

First, lets publish the application. We will install the Windows Service in-place, meaning the exe will be locked whenever the service is running. The publish step is a nice way to make sure all the files I need to run the service are in one place and ready to be installed.

dotnet publish -o c:\code\workerpub

Then we can use the sc utility in an admin command prompt

sc create workertest binPath=c:\code\workerpub\WorkerTest.exe

For example:

Security note: This command has the service run as local system, which isn’t something you will generally want to do. Instead you should create a service account and run the windows service as that account. We will not talk about that here, but there is some documentation on the ASP.NET docs talking about it here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/host-and-deploy/windows-service?view=aspnetcore-2.2

Logging

The logging system has an Event Log provider that can send log message directly to the Windows Event Log. To log to the event log you can add the Microsoft.Extensions.Logging.EventLog package and then modify your Program.cs:

public static IHostBuilder CreateHostBuilder(string[] args) => Host.CreateDefaultBuilder(args) .ConfigureLogging(loggerFactory => loggerFactory.AddEventLog()) .ConfigureServices(services => { services.AddHostedService<Worker>(); });

In upcoming previews we plan to improve the experience of using Workers with Windows Services by:

1. Rename UseWindowsServiceBaseLifetime to UseWindowsService
2. Add automatic and improved integration with the Event Log when running as a Windows Service.

We hope you try out this new template and want you to let us know how it goes, you can file any bugs or suggestions here: https://github.com/aspnet/AspNetCore/issues/new/choose

After doing keynotes for Google, Unity and Unreal, some people have been asking when the Godot keynote is going to be.  The answer is basically never… these things cost millions of dollars and that’s just not compatible with the way Godot’s open source development works.  That doesn’t mean that exciting things haven’t been happening in the land of Godot, some big and some small enough they didn’t merit their own coverage.  So here we are!

Godot 3.1 Was Released

Obviously the big news is, after a year in development, Godot 3.1 became a reality last week!  You can watch our video on the subject here and read the official blog here.  Usability improvements across the entire engine, a GL ES2 renderer, CSG support, optional static typing and much more were added to the engine.

Rust Language Bindings

Want to use the Rust programming language in Godot?  Now you can thanks to this set of GDNative language bindings available on Github.

GDScript Playground

It’s an interactive browser based way to run and test GDScript.  Check it out here.

Battle for Wesnoth Porting to Godot

First teased in a tweet it seems the popular open source turn based strategy game Battle for Wesnoth is being ported from C++ to the Godot Engine.  Link to the Wesnoth 2.0 prototype on Github thanks to Feniks Gaming.

Offline Documentation Builds

Got spotty internet or just want an offline copy of the Godot documentation?  Now you can get it from this nightly build source.  It’s basically the online documentation built for offline use.

GameDev News Godot

Click Here!